


Parables

by icarus_chained



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Metropolis (1927)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gallifrey, Gen, Insanity, Time Lords, Time War, Violence, War, fatigue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-07-04
Packaged: 2017-11-09 04:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Fall of Gallifrey. Come, Time Lords. Listen to the parable of the Head, the Heart, and the Hands.</p>
<p>Written for the prompt of a fusion between DW and Fritz Lang's <i>Metropolis</i>. Um. See notes for more details.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parables

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt on LJ, asking for a fusion of Who with Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_. Which was ... wow. Now _there's_ a thought or twenty (or roughly five billion). Um. Not sure how well this came out, I had to smush some of the parallels together - The Time Lords for the City Masters, Davros for Rotwang, simple enough, but the Doctor is taking both Freder and Maria, and bits of Robo!Maria, and he's sharing the last with the Daleks, and the first two with one other Time Lord, so ... *grins sheepishly* Possibly somewhat confused -_-;
> 
> Also, despite the tags, it's not really an AU/fusion. Metropolis actually lifts more or less straight onto the canon of the Time War. Heh.

“Come, Time Lords,” the man said, to the children gathered around him, with their hollowed cheeks, and their eyes burning with the fires of Time. “Come, hear the parable of the Head, the Heart, and the Hands.”

The Time Lord looked out on his audience, the trembling remnants of a future lost, hanging on his every word, and his mouth twisted softly.

“Once,” he said, in a voice humming with pain and conviction, “there was a great citadel. The pinnacle of civilisation, the first, last, and greatest Metropolis. A citadel inhabited only by the most perfect and knowledgeable of citizens. In truth, the greatest citadel there ever was.

“But this citadel had a dark secret. For all the vision of its creator, for all the grand dreams of its founding, a city is only as great as the hands that build it, and the rock it sits upon. And this citadel, this great Metropolis, sat on a cesspool. A rank, gnawing pit of lesser beings, whose hands, whose fates, had been drawn to the forging of the dream.

“That, of itself, was nothing terrible, though. It is the purpose of lesser beings to be the Hands of those with vision, of the great Minds. In their service to the Citadel of Time, to the Metropolis, for all their pain, they had purpose. They had strength. They were, if not content, at least unmoved.

“Until, one day, something happened. A great and terrible coming, a crushing cataclysm. That started, so simply, with nothing more than a foolish boy. A renegade, a son of the Citadel, one of the favoured view, who chose one day to walk below. To travel into the Undercity, the universe beneath, the cesspit. To see, for whatever reason, what passed there. And what he found, that Bleeding Heart, that renegade, shocked him. Enraged him. Slowly, at first, but more and more surely, as his travels continued.

“He grew angry, this renegade. He felt for the supposed plight of the lesser peoples, of the Hands that built the city. He believed that they should have a say, that between the Head and the Hands should be a Heart, and that Heart should serve them both. Protect them both. That Heart … should allow corruption between them.

“It was innocent at first, perhaps. Innocent, an angry youth, disaffected. So the leaders of the citadel thought. So they, in their foolishness, believed, and in believing, allowed the youth to travel unchecked. Only curbed his greater crimes, his greater foolishness, and left the base, the most insidious, untouched. In the beginning, unknowing, perhaps it was innocent.

“But soon, the boy began to change. This self-professed Heart, standing between the two extremes, began to show his corruption in truth. And began, in his turn to beget other corruptions.

“He began raising the Hands against the citadel. He began decrying the great Minds to their faces, to the masses. Began inciting the cesspit to rise. And as his faces changed, as his corruption grew and became visible in his features, at once devil and angel, turn for turn, so too did other mirrors spring up, echoes of that first Corruption. The Machines, which had served the Citadel once, were raised in the Heart’s corrupted image, foul golems raised from his interventions, and set upon the citadel itself. In the shadows behind his bright fury, other creatures toiled, foul scientists, mad alchemists, set upon destruction. To the furious cries of this one, disaffected youth, to his rages against that which had nurtured him, so unrest was set in the City Beneath, in the rock upon which the Citadel sat.

“And unrest rose to violence. Violence rose to war. And war, in the end, when the Floodgates opened on the Timestream itself, rose to annihilation. To the destruction of all that was, and the great and final tumbling of that once great, nay, _greatest_ , of Cities. That now-fallen Metropolis. For this one, mad youth, destruction was wrought upon all!”

The Time Lord stopped, staggered, having found himself standing, having found his voice rising to a ringing, clarion cry. He stopped, to the stunned, burning ring of gazes about him, the hollowed, staring eyes of Time, and calmed himself. Drew stuttering breath, and found again his seat.

“That is the parable, Time Lords,” he said, when he had calmed. “That is the tale of the Head, the Heart, and the Hands. And from it … From it, I hope the lesson is clear?” 

He looked around, took in their wide-eyed, hollow stares, the dull, fevered gleam of dying fire. 

“The lesson,” he finished, softly, “is that the head must never, ever lose control of the Heart. That the Hands must know their place. That the Corruption must be caught, be stamped out, before ever it has a chance to grow!” He snarled, near unconsciously. “The lesson, Time Lords, is that, whatever face he wears, however beguiling his innocence and his reason, the Bleeding Heart must be cut from the breast of Time, and his corruption cast away in entirety!”

He breathed, a shudder in his own chest, a desperate rattle of a heart he had sacrificed, long ago, to the dreams and visions and desperate, terrible realities, of the Mind.

“Dismissed,” he said, and for some reason there was no strength in it. No more fire, no more fury. Only an exhaustion without end.

And as he sat, still and ragged, the words of that fateful parable ringing even still in his ears, she came to him. She moved through the ragged ranks of children, pale shadows of the future lost, and moved to his side.

“How long?” she asked him, softly. “How long, Rassilon, do you mean to tell them these lies?”

“Lies!” He spat, found energy to spit, turning to face her. This angel almost-corrupted, this woman who had walked, once, besides their Bleeding Heart, and listened to him too well, and for too long. “Lies, you think?” He snarled, standing before her, shaking his head. “You call them lies, when we lie stinking beyond Time? When we rot, sacrificed for his precious Hands, his _mortals_ , behind the wall _he_ raised against us? Trapped forever in bloody war with the fruits of his corruption, his interference? _Lies_?!”

She stood her ground. A vague flinch, a tremble in the face of him, but she stood her ground. Even as _he_ had before her. Even as her mentor, the Doctor, once had.

“Lies,” Rassilon said, exhausted, spent, looking at her proud, defiant face and suddenly feeling nothing but tiredness, a weariness stretched to infinity, behind this endless Wall of Time. “What lies do I tell, Lady Romana?”

What lies had he ever told?

And that would have been that, that would have been all, he thought, as he turned away, to follow the remnants of their people out to battle, but she was, still, the Doctor’s student. She was, still, the remnant of that corruption yet within their breast. And she whispered, softly, defiantly, to his departing back:

“What of the Architect’s lies?” A smile, soft and black and tired. “What of the poison of the first dream, and the Minds that made it? Tell me, Rassilon. Will you ever tell them parables of that?”

She shook her head, grinning darkly, and walked calmly past his stiff and raging form. 

“No,” she decided, quietly. “No. Perhaps … there is no more time, for that.”


End file.
